On one side is Emma Thompson playing P.L. Travers, author of the
Mary Poppins books — who needs money but doesn’t want the Hollywood monsters meddling with
Mary.

On the other side is Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, who spent 20 years and two highly contentious
weeks wrestling the rights away from the stubborn author.

The Travers-Disney battle forms the basis of
Saving Mr. Banks, to be released on Dec. 20 in theaters. The Disney-produced film recounts
the two weeks in 1961 that Travers spent torturing Disney and his
Mary Poppins production team with a constant stream of “No, no, no. That’s not how it
is."

We know how the story ends:
Mary Poppins became an Academy Award-winning movie that appeals to generation after
generation.

In a suite recently at the Beverly Hills (Calif.) Hotel, where Travers stayed in 1961, Thompson,
54, was more relaxed than her uptight character in
Mr. Banks.

“I love this movie. I love it,” the actress said. “I hear the quibbles, but perhaps it’s my own
connections with loss and fathers that make me think there’s so much in it for all of us.

“My friend and producer Lindsay Doran saw the film and was in pieces, just crying away. She
said, ‘Why don’t they just call it
Father Issues?’ ”

Saving Mr. Banks pays close attention to the relationship between Travers, who was born
Helen Goff in Australia, and her father, Travers Goff, who died when Helen was 9.

“We all have father issues in one way or another,” said Thompson, whose father, British actor
Eric Thompson, died in 1982 at age 53 as she was just beginning the career that has netted her two
Oscars.

“We come back again and again to the reality that our relationship with ourselves is profoundly
and terrifyingly dependent on those early atomic relationships with parents.”

That Travers is rude to Disney and his team in the film delighted Thompson.

“We’re all so bloody polite all the time — Americans, particularly,” she said. “It’s bliss to
see someone so rude.”